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Summer 2026

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The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America

by John Fabian Witt

Simon & Schuster, 2025, 736 pp.

In 1922 the American Fund for Public Service received two requests for money from people who would become famous campaigners for labor rights and racial justice. One came from union organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who admitted that she had “tried very hard . . . not to ask rich people for money” and “dislike[d] intensely to apply,” but needed funds for the defense of jailed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The other letter came from A. Philip Randolph, who would go on to found the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and plan the March on Washington. At the time, Randolph needed funding to keep The Messenger, the Black socialist magazine he started, afloat. Randolph also wrote with reluctance, having called the donor behind the foundation a “mental nut” and a “simpleton” just the year prior. Under normal circumstances, coming hat in hand to a foundation while promoting leftist causes would have been unwise, if not foolhardy. The American Fund, or the Garland Fund as it was known, was not, however, an ordinary foundation. The requests were quickly approved.

As Flynn and Randolph both knew, the recipient of their appeals, Roger Baldwin, shared their radical politics and skepticism of private philanthropy as a potentially corrupting influence. When he founded the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, Baldwin had designed it as a membership-based organization of dues-paying individuals to deliberately avoid the sway of elite donors. “No work can be democratic which is supported by one class for the benefit of another,” he wrote. Such sentiments picked up on a debate active in the halls of Congress and on union shop floors in the 1920s about the threat—or “menace,” as one contemporary critic charged—to democratic society posed by the creation of philanthropic foundations with increasingly large endowments and increasingly broad missions.

Yet that very same year Baldwin found himself head of a foundation established by a recalcitrant, radical young millionaire whose first instinct was to refuse his inheritance—a bequest from his grandfather’s career in finance worth the equivalent of $18 million today—which came due on his twenty-first birthday. Press coverage of Charles Garland’s refusal generated guffaws and offers to take the wealth off his hands, as well as a few paeans from admirers who celebrated Garland’s unwillingness to participate in a political economy rooted in exploitation and inequality. It also generated a proposal from none other than muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair, who beseeched Garland to use the money to build a better world. Sinclair admitted to the contradictions in using the proceeds of capitalism to dismantle its very foundations but argued to Garland that “such is the complexity of life.”

After several rounds of correspondence, Sinclair introduced Garland to Baldwin as a like-minded thinker. By 1922 the two had hatched a plan to use the inheritance to endow a new entity, the American Fund for Public Service, to test whether wealth could attack inequality. With a small board—never more than thirteen members—and an impressive cadre of advisers, Baldwin ran the Garland Fund for the purpose of “experimenting with new institutions” and upending “present means of producing and distributing wealth.” Using the spoils of capitalism to construct a new world rooted in labor rights, racial justice, and democratic institutions was a plan as radical as the politics the foundation underwrote.

Today the philanthropic scene is dominated by large liberal foundations and a parallel network of conservative institutions. But John Fabian Witt’s chronicle of the Garland Fund’s two decades of existence (the board decided to spend the entirety of the endowment and closed shop in 1941) makes a compelling case for how and why philanthropy might support a leftist agenda. The Radical Fund may not convince everyone on the left that philanthropy is anything but an expression of plutocratic power. But this may be a moment—not unlike that when the Garland Fund operated—to embrace Sinclair’s “complexity of life,” or what Baldwin later called a “hypocrisy” that “tends to take you from where you are to where you want to go.” The radical potential of philanthropy is something those on both the giving and receiving end of philanthropy must grapple with as we struggle through another era of repression, violence, and inequality.

With meticulous detail, The Radical Fund offers a collective biography of the people, organizations, and ideas this pot of money brought together. To guide the foundation, Baldwin built a board “intentionally mixed” with liberal and leftist thinkers—those...